Event Details

This is the first in a second series of UCL-French Embassy events
proposed by Dr Serge Plattard, Counsellor
for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in London,
and UCL’s
Pro-Provost (Europe), Professor Mike Wilson.
The four events in Series One were linked to UCL’s society-focused Grand
Challenges programme. In Series Two the orientation is UCL’s new Research
Frontiers programme, with an emphasis on ‘origins’. Distinguished
figures from research-intensive universities and institutes in France and from
UCL will speak from different, complementary, and sometimes conflicting
perspectives on four research frontier topics. We start the second series with
the biggest question of them all: how it all began – the Origin of the Universe.

The UCL-French Embassy Lecture series 2011-12
is sponsored by the French Embassy, by the UCL Pro-Provost Europe, and by the
UCL Grand Challenges programme of the Office of the UCL Vice-Provost (Research).

Finding the evidence for the origin of everything

The UCL-French
Embassy ‘Origin of the Universe’ event provides a unique opportunity to hear
and question the research and perspectives of two major figures in
international cosmological collaborations -Jean-Loup Puget of the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, and
Ofer Lahav of UCL Physics and Astronomy. Professor Puget is lead designer and
principal scientist in the Planck High Frequency Instrument Consortium. The main goal of European Space Agency's Planck mission is to map the
Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation of the Big Bang which pervades
the entire Universe, and to pinpoint its tiny fluctuations with unprecedented
accuracy. Ofer Lahav is Chair of the International Science Committee of the
Dark Energy Survey, which is considering one of the greatest mysteries
in the whole of science – the prospect that 75% of the Universe is made from a
mysterious substance known as 'Dark Energy', which causes an acceleration of the
cosmic expansion. The work of both speakers attests to one of the great
success stories of intercultural interaction (the subject of UCL’s third Grand
Challenge) – that of massive (‘big science’) projects that require the widest
possible international collaboration for their success.

Programme

17.00 Introduction –
David Price / Mike Wilson

17.05 1st talk: Origin of the
universe: How science is dealing with this problem? How can we observe the very
early universe? – Jean-Loup Puget (chairman: Serge Plattard)

Jean-Loup Puget graduated in Physics (1968)
and Theoretical Physics (1969) from Orsay
University in Paris. Supervised by Evry Schatzman he obtained
his PhD in Cosmology from the University
of Paris in 1973. After
postdoctoral studies at NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight
Center, he returned to Paris to take up the
Deputy-Directorship of the Institut
d'Astrophysique de Paris. Between 1982 and 1989 he was based in the Physics
Department of the Ecole Normal Superieur in Paris, moving to his current
research base, the Institut
d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay in 1989, where he was Director from 1998 to
2006. He has been Principal Investigator, Planck High Frequency Instrument,
since 1995.

Ofer Lahav

Ofer Lahav graduated in Physics (BSc 1980 Tel
Aviv University; MSc 1985 Ben-Gurion University). Supervised by George
Efstathiou and Donald Lynden-Bell, he obtained his Cambridge PhD in Astronomy
in 1985. He has held research positions at Cambridge,
Princeton and at the Hebrew
University. He moved from
Cambridge to
UCL in 2004, where he established a Cosmology group, which is heavily
involved in new large galaxy surveys for studying Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
He leads the international Dark Energy Survey science programme and he chairs
the UK
consortium for this survey. He is currently a Vice-President of the Royal
Astronomical Society and a holder of a Wolfson Royal Society Research Merit
Award. He was recently appointed UCL Vice-Dean (Research) at the Faculty
of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.